Guy Reams (00:02.872)
This is day 344, the thread you weave. What if you discovered that your daily struggles, your moments of doubt, and even your Monday and Tuesday afternoons were all just part of something magnificent? What if every choice you make, whether to hit the snooze or rise early, whether to speak up or stay silent, was adding another stitch to a cosmic tapestry that has been weaving since the beginning of time?
Jason Mraz asks in a song, How old is your soul? It's the kind of question that stops you mid scroll through your phone. Because if you really consider it, if you suspend disbelief for just a moment, you might realize that you've been thinking too small about your life. The ancient Anglo-Saxons called it weird. The Norse had their prose at a Plato theory theorized about external, for eternal forms.
Tolkien imagined the music as being creation itself, all pointing to the same critical and potentially radical idea. You are not just living a life, you are representing an idea in the universe's greatest story. So what idea are you? Here's where it gets personal. If every soul is a unique thread in this cosmic weaving, then what makes your thread irreplaceable? What idea do you embody that no one else can?
Maybe you are the threat of quiet courage, the person who speaks up when everyone else stays silent. Perhaps you represent curiosity or relentless curiosity, always asking the next question that opens the new doors. Or you could be the embodiment of fierce loyalty, the friend who shows up when all others disappear. The beautiful thing is you do not have to be perfect to be essential. Even struggle serves the story.
The thread has been pulled and tested often, creates the most interesting patterns in the tapestry. Every morning you face the same fundamental question that leaders wrestled with, that leaders that wrestle with layoffs do, that artists staring at Blake canvases do, that anyone trying to live meaningfully always faces. What is right and what is necessary? Kant would tell you to act only in ways you would want everyone else to act. Mill would
Guy Reams (02:29.568)
say choose what creates the most happiness in your life. Here's what the tapestry metaphor adds to those two equations. Your thread matters not only for its individual color, but how it interacts with all the other threads around it. Your choices ripple outward. The energy you bring, literally that ATP that's firing through your neurons as you decide how to respond to that difficult email, might affect the pattern of what that is being woven around you.
Want to know something fascinating? Your brain consumes 25 % of your body's energy despite being only 2 % of your weight. Every thought, every decision, every moment of creativity is literally burning fuel. And when you move your body, you are not just burning calories, you are recharging the very engine that powers your contribution to the great story. Physical movement increases your cellular energy production by up to 100 times.
It is as if the universe designed us to be most alive, most capable of weaving our unique thread when we were in motion. So here's the question that matters. If you really are an ancient soul temporarily housed in this body living out your part in an epic story that has been folding since time began, what happens in your next chapter?
The tapestry is being woven, your thread is being added. Somewhere in the intersection of what is right and what is necessary, in the space between movement and rest, between individual choice and unique pattern, your unique contribution will continue. The story is not finished and neither are you. So what idea will you represent today?